All the Dead Lie Down

by Mary Willis Walker

  “Everybody tells me that. I thought you might be different.”

  “Miss—what are you called?”

  “Cates. Molly. I’m called Molly.”

  “I’m working now. Maybe you can’t see it, but I am.”

  “What is your work?”

  “I counsel ‘ladies of the night.’ “She rolled her eyes, making fun of the phrase. “I try to save their bodies from disease and their souls from sin. It is what the Church calls my ‘special mission.’ “

  “Well, I’m a lady of the night,” Molly said. “Counsel me. I wake up at 3 A.M. in terror, and my soul needs saving from sin.”

  “What is your sin?”

  “Hatred. My heart is so full of it, I can feel the frost forming.” She had said it lightly, but as soon as she spoke the words, she knew it was true.

  “Who do you hate?”

  “The same person you hate. Or did once. Olin Crocker.”

  La Risa looked down at the sidewalk and shook her head, as if in exasperation. When she looked back up, she said, “We can get coffee if you want. But I’ll have to make it quick.” She nodded to the neon sign behind them. “Las Brujas okay?”

  “Sure.”

  The smoke inside the bar was so dense, Molly was blinded by it at first. La Risa led her to a table near the back. “Leo!” she shouted to the man behind the crowded bar. “Dos cafés, por favor.”

  They sat in silence while Molly tried to decide how to begin. Her eyes were watering from the smoke, but she surveyed the crowded room. Her attention was caught by a huge painting over the bar. It was of three naked, straggly-haired, withered-breasted old crones huddled around a black pot with a fire burning under it. The painting was very dark, but a spotlight shone on it and made the brilliant oranges, reds, and yellows of the fire glow warm in the dim bar, as if it were a real fire. Sylvia Ramos saw her looking at it. “Las brujas. The witches.”

  Molly hadn’t known what Las Brujas meant. She studied the witches’ wrinkled, emaciated bodies. “Scary,” she said.

  “Witches?”

  “No. Getting old, becoming a crone. There are mornings when I look like that.”

  La Risa regarded her with an unreadable expression on her placid features.

  The bartender, a squat, unshaven man in a filthy apron, set down in front of them two mugs of coffee and a plate with sugar and cream.

  “Gracias, Leo.” La Risa smiled up at him.

  “Are you a Catholic nun?” Molly asked.

  “Yes.”

  “For how long?”

  “Seven years.”

  “Are you called La Risa by your friends?”

  “No. That’s just on the street. In the Order, I’m Sister Sylvia Ramos.”

  “What should I call you?”

  “Don’t call me anything. Tell me what you want.”

  “Back in 1975, after you got out of jail in Austin, you and Christine Fanon filed a lawsuit against Sheriff Crocker. I wonder if you could tell me about it and why you dropped it.”

  La Risa lifted her chin and looked at Molly as if from a long distance away. “Who are you to ask me this?” Her tone was icy.

  “I’m a writer. I work for Lone Star Monthly magazine in Austin, but this is not connected to my work. My interest is … personal.”

  La Risa took a sip of coffee. “Tell me about your ‘personal interest.’ ”

  “If I show you mine, you’ll show me yours?” Molly said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay. In 1970, when I was sixteen, my father was murdered in Travis County. Olin Crocker was the sheriff. He was in charge of the case, but he didn’t do much investigating. He called my father’s murder a suicide, but I knew it wasn’t. I tried to investigate it myself, but I got nowhere, and Crocker was no help at all. Four years later, some new evidence came up and I went to see him. I asked him if I could look at it—the new evidence, something I believed was stolen from my daddy’s office when he was killed. Crocker said no, but he had some new information in the case and—” Molly paused here. She was rambling. She’d come to get information, not give it. “Well, he never did show me, and I just recently found out about your lawsuit and I—”

  Sylvia Ramos held up a hand. “Stop there. You want me to tell you something embarrassing and painful about my life. But you won’t do it yourself.”

  “Do what?”

  “Be honest. One thing about those young putas out there”—she gestured to the door—“they know how to tell the truth. When they talk about their lives, they tell it like it is.”

  Molly was confused. “Are you saying I’m not telling the truth?”

  “You think if something bad happens to me or to them we should talk about it, right? But if it happens to you, it’s private.”

  Molly’s face was heating up. “I just told you about my father’s death and why I’m interested in Crocker. That’s being private?”

  “You’re telling me the cleaned-up version.”

  “I told you my history with Crocker. And I asked you about yours. What’s wrong with that?” Boy, this woman really had a chip on her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong is you’re bullshitting me.”

  Molly was incensed. “You’re a nun! Is this how you counsel people?”

  La Risa looked her in the eye. “Yes. This is how I counsel people. I have no time to waste with bullshitters.”

  “What did I say that was bullshit?”

  “You’re not telling the truth.”

  “Yes, I am. That’s what happened. I—”

  “Look.” La Risa leaned toward Molly. “I knew Crocker. I can guess what happened: he said he’d tell you what you wanted to know if you’d give him a blow job, or maybe, depending on the mood he was in, if you’d fuck him, or maybe he wanted you to bring a friend along so you could have a three-way. You did what he asked, and the son of a bitch double-crossed. And you’re still mad about it. That’s why you have that closed look when you talk about him, with your mouth all tight.”

  Molly was speechless. The smoke was strangling her, stinging her eyes. She needed to get out of here. This woman was intolerable.

  La Risa moved her face closer. “Am I shocking you? Well, I’m so sorry.” She stood up. “You see, I was a whore for nearly ten years. I hang out with whores now. We talk about blow jobs and butt fucks like bartenders talk about margaritas and Manhattans.” She turned and walked toward the door.

  Molly struggled to regain her equilibrium. Her face felt burning hot and she couldn’t decide if she wanted this woman to go or stay. She had never told anyone what had happened with Olin Crocker. It wasn’t anyone else’s business. She was here to ask the questions, not to be abused like this. “Wait,” Molly called. “Wait a minute.”

  La Risa turned around. “Why?”

  “Because I—” She stopped herself, about to repeat what she had already said. Instead she said, “How did you know?”

  La Risa walked back to the table. “Easy. You were a young girl. Attractive. Helpless. That’s what Crocker liked, that’s what he did.”

  Molly sat looking into her coffee, feeling totally humiliated. She was a victim like all the rest and she hated it. When she looked up, Sylvia Ramos was looking down at her with eyes full of compassion. “It wasn’t your fault, chica. You know that.”

  “Not the first time,” Molly said, barely able to meet the other woman’s eyes, “when I was sixteen. But the second time, I was twenty-one, a grown woman, married. And I knew what he was.”

  “Crocker was the worst man I’ve run into and there’s some tough competition out there. He’s still alive, I guess.”

  “Yes.”

  La Risa sat down. “You tell me what happened. It will lose some of its power then.”

  “I know.” It was something Molly told people all the time to get them to talk to her, and she believed it was true: nothing defanged pain and shame like talking about it. But this subject was so difficult she didn’t know if she could even find the words. La Risa h
ad already started supplying them for her, though. Maybe she could.

  “Go on. Try it.”

  “When I was sixteen Crocker came to my house. He said he would tell me all the things about my daddy’s case that hadn’t been made public, the things the police always hold back, but he would tell me if I would—” Her teeth clenched against remembering it.

  “Say it to me. Right out loud. Like this.” La Risa turned toward the crowd at the bar and announced in a loud voice. “Yo mame la verga.”

  Every head in the room turned their way. Several men laughed. One applauded.

  “What did you say?” Molly asked.

  “‘I sucked his cock.’ Now you say it.” She smiled at Molly for the first time, and it was a gorgeous smile. “Go ahead.”

  “I sucked his cock.” Molly said it forcefully, but her face burned.

  “Now that wasn’t so bad.”

  “But then he didn’t tell me anything.”

  “I bet. That was his way. He didn’t keep bargains.”

  “So four years later I should have known better.”

  “But you didn’t. Some of us learn slow. Or we want something so bad, we just keep on trying.”

  “He came to my house again. My husband was at work. And I did it again.”

  “Say it—you sucked his cock. You gave him a blow job. You gave him head. Shout it out. It’ll make it easier.”

  “It’s not that I’m prudish, usually…. It’s just so hard to talk about this.”

  “When it’s forced on you, sex hurts you in one way or another. Crocker was really good at this. He’d make sure you were too ashamed to talk about it.”

  “But I agreed to it. That’s the thing. It wasn’t like I was being raped.”

  “No?”

  “I mean there was no force involved. I was twenty-one. I didn’t have to.”

  “Oh?”

  “And of course the second time he didn’t tell me anything either.”

  “Hey,” La Risa said, “you want a real drink? You look like you could use it.”

  Molly nodded. “A glass of white wine.”

  “White wine?” She laughed. “A real drink. Leo will like that.” She shouted, “Leo! Give us a white wine and another coffee.”

  Immediately the bartender brought the order. Molly was impressed with the level of the service La Risa got.

  The nun sipped her second cup of coffee and said, “I need to get back out there, on the street. They know that’s where they can find me on Fridays. My office hours.”

  “What do you do for them?” Molly asked.

  “Not much.”

  “That girl I talked to—the one in the red shirt—couldn’t be more than fourteen.”

  “Camilla? She’s twelve.”

  “Lord.”

  “What I do is listen to what they want to talk about and then I tell them about other choices.” She lowered her voice. “I also give them rubbers. The Church doesn’t know about that, of course. I have to buy them with money people give me. Leo there”—she glanced toward the bar—“is my big donor.”

  “What choices do you tell them about?”

  “That’s the problem. But we’re working on a shelter where they can stay if they’re trying to get out of the life. Money’s real hard to find. Whores are not anybody’s favorite charity.” She shrugged. “If the shelter gets done, I want to call it the Casa Christine, in memory of Christine Fanon, but the Church says you can’t name a place after a whore. They want to call it Casa de Caridad.” She took a long drink of her coffee.

  “How much do you need? For the shelter.”

  “To finish the building—about seventy thousand.” She pushed her empty mug away. “I got to go.”

  “I know, but tell me first about the lawsuit.”

  “Mary, Mother of God—the suit.” La Risa tipped her head back and closed her eyes for a few seconds. “Okay, it’s really the story of Christie.”

  “Christine Fanon?”

  “My first real friend. I had to go to jail to find a friend. I was eighteen, she was seventeen. I was doing ten months for theft, she was in for possession. First time for both of us. I guess I’d had girlfriends before, but not a soul mate, somebody I’d tell everything to. She was this funny, skinny, freckled blonde girl. Looked like she was ten years old. Came from a family even worse than mine. We hung out together and talked and talked. It made the time pass, which is a big deal when you’re in jail.

  “I’d been in maybe six months when one day Sheriff Crocker asked for me to come to the warden’s office. The warden wasn’t there, just Crocker. Did I want an early release, he asked me, so I could get this all behind me?

  “‘Sure,’ I said. ‘How about today?’ Real cocky, you know. In those days it was all I had.

  “He said, ‘It’ll take a week, but I’ll fix you up.’

  “‘How about my girlfriend up in the block?’ I asked. I was so stupid.” She took a long drink of her coffee. “I was signing her death warrant.

  “ ‘Who’s your friend?’ he wanted to know. ‘Christine Fanon,’ I said. ‘She pretty like you?’ he asked. I still didn’t see it coming. ‘She’s pretty, I guess. In this little-girl way.’

  “He said, ‘Pretty Mescan señorita like you, I bet you know how to take care of a man, make him feel good, don’t you?’

  “Until then I didn’t understand the deal. He stood right in front of me where I was sitting and he real slow unzipped his pants, like he had the Holy Grail in there. All I had to do was suck him off, he said, show him how grateful I was.

  “I was no virgin, but I never did sex for money or favors. I didn’t want to. I hated to do it, but I was scared. He was the sheriff. And I wanted to get out of there. So I figured what the hell, nobody would ever know and I’d just forget it ever happened.

  “And he got me an early release, me and Christie both, but there was a catch. Of course. This was Crocker. There was always a catch. The day we got released he called both of us into the office and said he had us some jobs. In his massage business.”

  “Miracle Massage in South Austin?”

  “You got it.”

  Molly was aghast; this was far beyond the sexual harassment and abuse of office she’d known about. “Crocker recruited inmates to work there?”

  “Recruited is not the half of it. He made offers they couldn’t refuse. All the girls were on parole, early release for ‘good behavior.’ ”

  “So you went to work there?”

  “Not right away. Christie said no. And she told her lawyer and the lawyer said we’d sue Crocker. I was scared, but Christie was a fighter, not somebody you could bully. And I loved her for it. So we did it, and it was really a dumb thing. Crocker found us the next day, pissed off like you wouldn’t believe. He had papers that revoked our paroles. He said when he got us back in jail he was going to fix us up to be suicides. Even Christie was scared. He told us the only way out was for us to drop the suit. Also we’d have to come work for him. He wanted to be sure he had us where he could keep an eye on us.”

  “So you did?”

  “Yeah. We dropped our suit, and we went to work for him.”

  “At Miracle Massage.”

  “Yeah. The miracle was you really got a massage with the sex. The johns could get a massage and hand job for twenty-five, a massage and blow job for fifty, or a massage and full sex for a hundred. The girls got to keep half. Best money I ever made. I got to say this for Crocker—he was a good businessman. He ran a tight prison and a whorehouse where everybody made money.”

  “Crocker ran it himself?”

  “Not day to day. This other guy, Eduardo Bandera, did that. But Crocker brought in the girls and he was the brains.”

  “He owned the building too,” Molly said. “Did you know that?”

  “No.”

  “We’ve got an intimate connection here.”

  “You mean we both sucked Crocker’s dick?”

  Molly smiled and was amazed that she could. “You
’re a hell of a nun.”

  “I know. That’s what my superior says.”

  “There’s another connection: the house. Crocker bought it the month after he called my father’s death a suicide. I believe the fifty thousand dollars he used to buy it was a payoff not to investigate my daddy’s death. What I need to know is who paid him.”

  “And you were hoping I could help?”

  “I guess. And I was just curious about your suit. You were my last lead. What happened to Christie?”

  “Crocker took a liking to her. He was turned on by women who looked like little girls, and he liked spirit in the women he ruined.” She looked at Molly over her coffee mug. “That may be why he liked you.”

  “No. I was a pushover. Christie sounds like the real goods.”

  “She was a tiger. But she was weak for drugs and Crocker made sure she got plenty of them. She was easier to control stoned. She never beat the addiction she got there. When we finally ran off to Houston, she was hopeless. The shit finally killed her.”

  “And you?”

  “I never got the habit. And I hated the life. When Christie died, I quit and went back home. My mother took me in.” She looked at Molly. “I guess you saw her. That’s how you found me?”

  Molly nodded.

  “I went back to school. Mama wanted me to be a teacher. I wanted to help putas and I needed the Church.” She leaned over and looked at Molly’s watch. “I got to go for real.”

  “Wait,” Molly said. “Let me ask you one more thing.”

  “Do I miss sex?” La Risa grinned. “Everyone asks that.”

  “No. If Crocker were on trial for some of his more recent crimes against young girls, would you come testify?” La Risa shook her head. “Sorry.”

  “How about giving me the names of some of the other girls who worked there?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Why?”

  “My Church says we’re supposed to forgive the bastards who trespass against us.”

  “Have you done that?”

  She laughed. “No, but I pray for the strength. What about you?”

  “I think I’d rather get revenge.”

  “‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’ ”

  “In this case I’m going to help Him out a little.” Molly paused. “Well, do you miss sex?”